Thursday editorial: Misleading Missouri on health care
The number of uninsured Missouri children increased by 44 percent since Gov. Matt Blunt took office in 2005, a fact we noted on this page Sept. 14. In a letter to the editor that we published Wednesday, Mr. Blunt complained that the editorial “misled readers and failed to fully compare Missouri with Illinois.”
In the interest of fair comparison, here are facts, complete with source citations. You can look them up and decide for yourself what is accurate, what is misleading and what is spin.
Let’s start with the editorial’s premise, which the governor’s complaint letter failed to address at all: Between 2005, when Mr. Blunt became governor, and 2007, the number of uninsured children in Missouri increased by 44 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. During that same period, the number of uninsured Illinois children was reduced by 1.7 percent.
• Unable to disprove these simple facts, Mr. Blunt bragged, instead, about Missouri’s State Children’s Health Insurance Program known as MC+ for Kids. Among comparable state programs, he wrote, Missouri’s is among the few that provide care to children in families earning up to 300 percent of poverty, about $51,500 for a family of three.
But Illinois also has a program called All Kids that is open to all Illinois children regardless of family income, and it’s the major reason why the state reduced the number of uninsured kids between 2005 and 2007— just the opposite of the trend in Missouri.
• Mr. Blunt’s letter also failed to mention that in cutting medical coverage for low-income working families in 2005, he made it harder for many of Missouri’s children to qualify for the MC+ program he praised so effusively.
Just before Mr. Blunt signed the Medicaid cuts in 2005, there were 554,286 Missouri children enrolled in MC+ for Kids, according to figures from the state Department of Social Services. At the end of June 2008, 486,522 children were enrolled, a decline of 67,764 — 12.2 percent — on Mr. Blunt’s watch.
• The governor’s letter said that the total number of uninsured Missourians fell by 43,000 between 2006 and 2007. It failed to point out, however, that the number increased by 104,000 after Mr. Blunt’s first year in office. Overall, the number of uninsured Missourians of all ages has increased by 61,000 under Mr. Blunt, according to U.S. Census figures. That’s a 9 percent increase. During the same period, the number of uninsured Illinois residents fell by 30,000.
Ordinarily, we accord readers fairly wide latitude to respond, in print and online, to published editorials. As editors and reporters at the state’s largest newspaper, we realize that we have a larger platform from which to make our points.
But as the governor of the state, Mr. Blunt has a significant platform as well, and despite his lame-duck status, he has used it with increasing frequency to launch misleading claims against people and institutions he perceives as political enemies. As those attacks are amplified through other media outlets, some Missourians may not realize that Mr. Blunt’s claims may be factually incorrect.
For example, he repeated a misleading claim in his letter to the Post-Dispatch this week: “When I took office in January 2005, I inherited a $1.1 billion budget deficit.”
There was no deficit. Missouri law does not permit it. The $1.1 billion figure Mr. Blunt cited and has cited in the past represented the difference between budget wish lists prepared by state department heads and the state’s projected revenues for his first year in office. The difference between the two cannot legitimately be called a budget deficit in which actual state spending exceeds revenues.
Mr. Blunt is entitled to his own opinions and to the respect accorded the office of governor. He is not entitled, however, to his own set of facts.
Post-Dispatch file photo.
Under Republican governence, both nationally and state-wide, it is apparent that just chanting the mantra “lower taxes” doesn’t meet the needs of it’s citizens. Missouri particularly is suffering with infra-structure deficits cited by crumbling bridges and roads. So too is the health care structure in our state. Governor Blunt’s total disregard for the fate of those who relied upon the safety-net the Medicaid program provided in order to keep up the chanting “lower taxes” was typical of the party-first, citizens-last that Republicans seems to embrace. The fact that our state and country is facing such astronomical deficits and financial disaster is further testament to the flawed platform of “party-first, citizens last”. At some point in time we are all called upon to pay more taxes to shore-up failing systems. In the case at hand in the country today the bill has now risen to 700 Billion Dollars.